Wise County Coal Plant (VA)
Coalition gains momentum in campaign to stop proposed coal-fired power plant
©Tim Wright
Kathy Selvage (L), with Southern Appalachian Mountain Stewards, chats with SELC Staff Attorney Cale Jaffe at a press conference in Richmond September 25 to launch the Wise Energy for Virginia Campaign
A coalition of citizens from Wise County and conservation groups including SELC has launched a campaign to stop a proposed coal-burning power plant in rural Southwest Virginia. Among other problems, the power plant would add to harmful air pollution in the region, increase greenhouse gas emission that cause global warming, and accelerate mountaintop removal mining in Appalachia.
In addition to stopping the power plant, the Wise Energy for Virginia campaign aims to pressure the state and electric utilities to step up efforts to increase energy efficiency, conservation, and renewable sources to meet present and future energy demand in the Commonwealth. A recent report by the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy (ACEEE) finds that utilities in Virginia allocate no funding whatsoever for energy efficiency programs, and that the Commonwealth ranks 38th nationally in energy efficiency.
Dominion Virginia Power filed an application in July 2007 with the State Corporation Commission, which must approve any new energy project based on need, to build a 585-megawatt power plant in Wise County. To get approval, utilities must consider all options for meeting new demand and select the lowest cost alternative. Dominion, however, has all but ignored energy efficiency and conservation alternatives.
Further, the facility design entails outdated technology that fails to reduce carbon dioxide, a main factor in global warming, despite the availability and use of low-carbon technology in other U.S. power plants. Dominion claims the Wise County plant would be “carbon capture compatible,” which state law requires for utilities to get permission to raise rates for new projects. But the company’s plans include little more than setting aside “adequate space for the future deployment of such technology,” according to its application.
SELC, as part of the Wise Energy for Virginia Coalition, filed papers with the commission in September 2007 seeking permission for the coalition members to intervene as parties in Dominion’s application process. We will also be directly involved in the public process as Dominion seeks environmental permits down the road.
The Wise County facility is one of several proposed old-style coal plants in the Southeast that SELC is fighting. The four plants (others are in North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia) would emit some 30 million tons of carbon dioxide each year, roughly the equivalent of pollution from 2 million cars.
In addition to global warming impacts, the rush by Dominion and others to build more coal-burning plants will intensify the environmental destruction wrought by mountaintop removal mining, in which companies blast the tops of Appalachian mountains to expose the coal, and fill in the narrow valleys with rock, rubble and slurry, destroying hundreds of streams in the process. In Virginia, Tennessee, West Virginia and Kentucky, mountaintop removal has leveled over 1 million acres, destroyed more than 470 mountains, and buried more than 1,000 miles of streams to date. SELC is involved at multiple levels in dramatically curtailing this industrial practice.
